VOICES bySharisse: From the porch to the lawn 

There are some spaces you attend, and then there are spaces you feel. The third annual Martha’s Vineyard Black Book Festival was one of those spaces. You could feel it before anyone even opened a book.

On Saturday, August 15, the Island Inn Conference Center in Oak Bluffs became a literary gathering place. Conversations unfolded inside the conference center and beneath the tent, both areas creating space to meet authors, discover their work, and continue conversations long after a panel ended. Bunch of Grapes Bookstore transformed one area into a festival bookshop, bringing together titles from the featured authors so that a story heard in one space could become the book you carried home from another. Authors, readers, and literary enthusiasts moved easily between it all, giving the festival an intimacy that felt almost like being welcomed into an ongoing conversation.

And it arrived during an August when that kind of intentional Black gathering seemed to be happening all around us. The Martha’s Vineyard African American Film Festival centered Black stories on the screen. HBCU Legacy Week celebrated the institutions that have educated and shaped generations of Black leaders. Across the Island, countless other gatherings created space for Black art, culture, entrepreneurship, history, joy, and community. The Black Book Festival added the written word to that larger conversation — a place not only to gather around our stories, but to preserve them in our own words.

Part of what made the scene at the Island Inn so powerful was remembering that none of it should be taken for granted. There were generations before us for whom literacy itself was deliberately restricted, whose stories were excluded from publishing, and whose voices were too often documented by others rather than preserved in their own words. Black writers have had to fight not only for the freedom to tell our stories, but for access to the institutions, publishers, bookshelves, and audiences that determine which stories are deemed worthy of being read.

Against that history, the scene before me carried a different weight. Here were Black authors sitting behind tables bearing their own names. Black readers chose which stories they wanted to carry home. Conversations centered not on whether our experiences were worthy of being documented, but on the extraordinary range of what we had to say.

The celebration felt hard-earned. And people showed up accordingly. Guests arrived dressed in their best — bold colors, beautiful prints, statement pieces, and personal style filling the lawn. There was an intentionality in how people showed up for one another. In a festival dedicated to storytelling, the books may have been at the center, but they weren’t the only things speaking. Fashion became its own language: an expression of identity, creativity, culture, and the understanding that gathering to celebrate Black literature was, itself, an occasion worth dressing for.

Then came the conversations. The laughter. The stories. The brilliance. This wasn’t simply a gathering of authors promoting books. It was Black stories being exchanged across generations, professions, and experiences — and a reminder of what becomes possible when we create intentional spaces to tell them.

For festival founder and CEO Traci Wilkes Smith, creating this gathering feels like both an extension of her professional life spent championing storytellers and a continuation of a much longer literary tradition on Martha’s Vineyard. A summer resident of Oak Bluffs who is married to fourth-generation Vineyarder Charles Smith, Wilkes Smith did not simply bring a book festival to the Island; she created one in a place where Black writers, thinkers, and families have long gathered in community. Now, only three years in, the festival is carving out its own place in that lineage — bringing contemporary Black authors and readers together on the same Island where generations before them gathered, wrote, and exchanged ideas.

“It’s such an honor to be able to lift up Black literature on Martha’s Vineyard, this historic space for literacy. We know Dorothy West and all of the people who went to her home and sat on her porch. This is an opportunity for us to not necessarily be on the porch, but to be on the lawn — to be at the center, in community and fellowship, where our ancestors were. These books are living. They’re talking about legacy, empowerment, and sustainability. These are the times when we need to be doing more of that. It’s just an honor to be in this space with these brilliant writers, and to be able to lift them up.”

That image stayed with me: from the porch to the lawn. Generations ago, Black writers, thinkers and creatives gathered in homes and on porches across this Island. Today, that tradition continues in new forms — and new generations are finding their place within it.

I met 17-year-old Aaliyah Shabazz, who traveled from Washington, D.C., alongside her 15-year-old friend Carter Bonas. Carter submitted his book, “Swinging Beyond the Spectrum,” to this year’s festival. It wasn’t selected. They came anyway.

“My friend Carter has a book out, and a nonprofit, and he’s only 15 years old,” Aaliyah said. “He applied to the festival and didn’t get in this year, but we still wanted to come out and support all of the other authors who were accepted and were able to showcase their books. We wanted to be here to support them.”

At 15 and 17, respectively, they already understand something that can take a lifetime to learn: Community is not always about being the person celebrated. Sometimes it is simply about showing up to celebrate someone else. And people showed up.

For first-time attendee Michelle Carter, seeing so many Black stories gathered together created recognition.

“We’re sharing our stories and giving someone else the opportunity to say, ‘That happened to me, too.’ To see the journeys all of these authors have gone through, whether they’re celebrities or just coming up, and to feel the magical bond that’s here with our people, with Black people — it is just amazing.”

That may be one of literature’s greatest gifts: realizing that something you thought belonged only to you has been lived, survived, or felt by someone else. But gathering Black stories does not require those stories to become one story.

Acclaimed author Walter Mosley put it plainly: “I think the only responsibility that Black people have is to tell their stories — and to tell their stories the way they know their stories. Whether I agree with them or whether I don’t, that’s what’s important. It’s not like you belong to a certain party and there’s a party line … But if we all just celebrate each other, then that’s how we celebrate our individuality.”

That individuality was everywhere: in the books lining the tables, in the conversations unfolding across the lawn, beneath the tent, and inside the conference center, and even in what people wore. And the stories themselves did more than entertain. They gave language to experiences that are sometimes difficult to name.

Legal scholar and civil rights advocate Kimberlé W. Crenshaw, who coined the term “intersectionality” in her groundbreaking 1989 scholarship to describe how overlapping systems of discrimination shape lived experience, spoke to the power that comes with having language for what we experience: “When you don’t have literacy about that thing, you can’t fight it, you can’t transform it.” Perhaps that is another reason spaces that are centered on Black books matter so much. Storytelling can give us vocabulary for experiences we have felt but never named. A reader can encounter someone else’s words and suddenly recognize their own life more clearly. Once something has language, it can be shared, questioned — and sometimes transformed.

For featured author Dr. Imamu (“Mu”) Tomlinson, the festival created an environment where that exchange could happen without the pressure authors often feel to sell themselves. “It’s an awesome experience to be here. Just the culture, and being able to have people come here who want to learn, get better, and be inspired — as an author, that’s humbling. The best thing is to write a book; the worst thing is to sell it. But in this environment, you’re really not selling. You’re just talking about your story, which is amazing.”

In some ways, that simple observation captures what was happening all around us. People arrived with different histories, professions, cultures and perspectives, but the festival gave those differences somewhere to meet. And there was joy in that meeting.

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author Trymaine Lee reflected on something that can be easy to overlook when talking about the significance of Black spaces; sometimes their power is simply the freedom to experience joy together: “There is nothing like the freedom of being happy and happy with Black people.”

On Martha’s Vineyard, that joy has particular weight. Black people have gathered here for generations not only to discuss the serious questions facing our communities, but also to rest, laugh, dress beautifully, sit beside the water, share meals, fall in love, raise families, and simply be.

The Black Book Festival felt like another expression of that freedom: intellectual, creative, and joyful, all at once. And those stories don’t remain on the Island.

Professor and social worker Eugenia Correia Knight has attended all three years, and organizes her summer around the festival.

“There is no place where I feel like I can absorb so much literary Black excellence. As a professor, I come here to find books for my classes — whether I’m teaching complex concepts through storytelling, or discovering someone I personally want to meet.”

She leaves carrying those books and ideas back to her students. The festival ends, but its reach does not. Perhaps that is how spaces of Black belonging endure. We gather. We receive something. We carry it with us. Then, somewhere else, we make room for someone new.

Author Amber Mayfield Hewett, whose work explores the power of hosting and gathering, captured that beautifully: “I really wrote ‘Your Turn to Host’ to make everybody feel confident about opening their doors, hosting the cookout, hosting a dinner party, and continuing to make this a safe space for us, generation over generation, through hosting and gathering and communion.”

Black belonging on Martha’s Vineyard did not sustain itself accidentally. Someone opened a door. Someone invited another family. Someone made room on the porch. Someone hosted the cookout. Someone set the table. And then the next generation did it again.

Only three years in, the Martha’s Vineyard Black Book Festival feels like another table being set — one where established authors sit alongside emerging voices, professors discover books for future students, teenagers travel across state lines to support one another, and guests arrive dressed beautifully — because celebrating each other is worthy of occasion.

Because books are never just books. They give us language. They remind us that our individual experiences deserve to be documented. They allow someone to tell the truth of their life and another person to quietly recognize, That happened to me, too.

And sometimes, they simply give us another reason to gather on a lawn, surrounded by our people, and experience the freedom of being together. From the porch to the lawn, perhaps that is the legacy being continued. We keep gathering. We keep making room. We keep telling our stories.